Atherosclerosis is a common finding in Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) and is a major cause of death and disease world over. Atherosclerosis or plaque/fatty material is deposited in the inner walls of coronary arteries and is widely scattered. An increase in atherosclerosis burden is associated with an increase in adverse events.
In conventional coronary angiography, tools such as Quantitative Coronary Analysis (QCA) are used for quantifying a degree of stenosis in a localized area in a blood vessel. However, there are no tools available that may automatically quantify the atherosclerotic burden in a coronary vascular structure in a diffuse coronary artery disease.
The QCA tool performs a localized analysis of the CAD. The QCA tool is used for analyzing stenosed regions marked by a physician. In other words, a physician marks the Region of Interest (ROI) in a radiography image showing the vasculature of the heart. Further, only the region marked by the physician is analyzed for stenosis. There may be other regions in the vascular structure that may have plaque depositions. Thus, there is a need for a tool that may estimate an overall atherosclerotic burden of an entire coronary vessel tree, which may include branches and crossovers.
Further, the existing tools have known to perform overestimation and underestimation of the plaque deposition in the coronary arteries. For example, there is a case of overestimation in case of calcified plaque deposits and a case of underestimation in the case of soft plaques. This renders the current tools unreliable for estimating an overall atherosclerotic burden. Therefore, there is a need for a tool that reliably estimates the overall atherosclerosis burden.